What's New in Marketing - Issue 40, July / August 2005

http://www.wnim.com

Top Tips to Get your Email Delivered

ISPs today block up to 90 percent of email because the messages are suspected to be spam. What’s a marketer to do?

Answer: Stay on the good side of ISPs.

Easier said than done, right? ISPs are using increasingly sophisticated tools to weed out spam, sometimes taking along legitimate business email as casualties. “False positive” filtering results in perfectly good emails ending up in the bulk folder, or worse yet, on black lists.

Developing a sound plan to move towards permission-based email marketing is extremely important to the success of any company’s email marketing effort. Also known as opt-in email marketing, permission-based email marketing entails sending email only to those recipients who have agreed to hear from a specific company.

Permission is important to ISPs and other receiving systems. When permission is in place, subscribers are much less likely to complain that a message is spam, and the message is therefore less likely to be filtered to the junk folder or discarded. Email addresses gathered without the subscriber’s knowledge or specific approval, however, will never qualify as permission names and will generate higher levels of complaints that could jeopardise the deliverability of future emails.

Tips for Getting Your Emails Delivered

Creating undeliverable emails results in loss of time, loss of money and missed opportunities for revenue and lead generation. How can you continue to build strong customer relationships despite an increase in filtering? How can you ensure that your emails are not erroneously blocked? Here are some tips:

1. Get and Confirm Permission - Receiving permission from your subscribers is the crux of a successful email program. Capturing opt-in permission and confirming it with a follow-up email is the best practice to ensure you only add recipients that really want your email.

2. Send Highly Valuable and Relevant Emails - As the inbox gets more crowded with spam, your subscribers will expect your email to provide them with relevant content. To make sure your emails are always relevant, begin capturing data on your subscribers via surveys or during sign-up.

3. Set Content and Frequency Expectations - Nothing can trigger subscriber dissatisfaction like continued emails that don’t meet subscriber expectations in terms of content of frequency. One study shows that 65 percent of men and 56 percent of women define spam as “emails from a company that I have done business with that comes too often.”

4. Use a Recognisable, Short and Consistent “From Address” - Before even opening your email, a user has to recognise you, your company and your publication, and remember that they requested your email. If they don’t, they will accidentally report your email as spam or delete it all together. The email “from address” is the first thing email recipients look at when deciding if they should open a message.

5. Use a Service Provider with a Good Reputation - The CAN-SPAM Act and the increase in ISP filtering make commercial emailing more difficult. Staying up-to-date on current legislation and policies of ISPs and anti-spam groups is difficult to do on your own. Reputable service providers, such as ExactTarget, dedicate significant resources to managing ISP relationships, monitoring email delivery rates and evaluating current email laws.

6. Ask to be Placed in the Address Book or Safe Senders List - AOL 9.0, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN and Outlook 2003 all remove their email filtering techniques when the sender’s email address is in the recipient’s address book. Once your “from address” is in a subscriber’s address book, your emails will continue to reach the inbox with images and links intact.

7. Keep Your List Clean - Most ISPs use list quality filters to detect when a sender is attempting to deliver email to a large number of invalid addresses. These messages “bounce” back to the originating server. Even a good, permission-based list will see bounces over time. An average email list will lose 30 percent of its names each year due to subscribers changing email addresses. To stay clean, monitor your bounces on a regular basis and remove bad addresses from your list.

8. Promptly Remove Unsubscribes and Respond to Complaints - Nothing will cause more problems for your deliverability than ignoring unsubscribes and complaints. You need to be diligent about removals and make it very easy for your subscribers to leave you. A profile management form allows subscribers to select the publications they want to receive or be removed from. This enables you to stay in compliance with the 10-day unsubscribe removal period mandated by CAN-SPAM, while still offering another option besides unsubscribing from all of your communications.

9. Use ISP Inbox Testing - Setting up an “ISP Test List” can be a fast and easy way to find out if your email will pass through spam filters. You can do so by simply setting up email accounts with the major ISPs, or by using a reputable deliverability monitoring service such as ExactTarget partner Pivotal Veracity. Before sending to your entire subscriber list, send to your “test list” and make sure your email reaches the inbox of each ISP. If it lands in a bulk folder or is blocked all together, you are then able to investigate and make changes.

10. Avoid “Spammy” Words and Phrases - Systematically scanning email subject lines and body content is the most widely used filtering method among ISPs, according to Jupiter Research. Avoid overly promotional words and phrases, multiple exclamation points, all capital letters and other text often used by spammers.

About the author

Chip House is vice president of privacy and deliverability for ExactTarget, a leading developer of on-demand outbound email software solutions with more than 3,250 customers.

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The Benchmarking Process - What’s it all about?

Benchmarking is a performance measurement tool used in conjunction with improvement initiatives to measure comparative, operating performance and identify best practices.

If you wish to compete in the global trading environment with a competitive advantage, `Benchmarking` is a tool for making improvement. To survive in a global trading environment you will need people with `passion` whom are `serious` about using business tools and models to drive continuous improvement throughout the `whole` of the organisation.

The first key in `Benchmarking` is the emphasis on `quality` in all aspects and functions of the organisations operation, not just in the provision of a major service or product to the external end customer.

Employee awareness and motivation are `essential`. Employees are responsible for ensuring `qualities` in terms of satisfying the customer in all they do, and the approach is one of prevention of errors and faults rather than detection and correction. Typically, cultural change in the organisation from reactive to proactive, and from an inspection to a prevention approach and to one of involvement, is necessary. Organisational change is also typically needed. A strong emphasis is also placed on identifying internal customers and meeting their needs. Emphasis must be placed on supplier/customer relationships. In such programme, `teamwork` is used to ensure involvement and a movement to a` continuous improvement` culture.

The second key to `Benchmarking` is the importance of business processes, as identified within theTQM approaches, rather than emphasising the classical functional divisions of the organisation. The organisation is seen, as a set of major and minor business process’s, each major process being concerned with delivery of a service/product to an end customer and, typically, running across all of the functional areas of the organisation. Such a process analysis makes us realise that typically the processes of the business have no single owners and that the end customer has to rely on satisfactory completion of process steps and communication by all the functional areas involved. By concentrating on the processes instead, we are able to identify process inefficiencies such as delays or queuing at process`bottle-necks`, lack of control or checking of a crucial process step, situations where the process is itself unable to cope or there is no clear process procedure and places where responsibility for process activities is not clear. We can identify measurement points in the process, verify how well we are currently doing and plan the introduction of improvements using the measurement points to monitor the improvements being achieved. Concentrating on the process enables us to monitor the internal workings of the system and just concentrate on the end product that the customer sees which is often too late.

The third key to `Benchmarking` is the limitation of the TQM model as it has evolved. The crude model concentrates clearly on the need to improve the importance of the customer, cultural change, of the continuous nature of improvement on `teamwork` and on the participation of everyone. While the programme should be steered by top management and the `way forward planned`, monitored, reviewed and readjusted, the basis data input in this measurement process is often taken naively as `performance` against `improvement` targets and past performance. While this is a good approach to get started, to break through the `cultural` barriers created by the mentality of conformance to requirement rather than self-improvement, it itself begs the question as to whether management really has a wide enough view to focus on the improvement process and the `real` issues.

If management accepts the fact that a TQM programme is necessary, it is, in a sense, admitting that its management skills in the past have not been perfect. It is admitting that there is a need to get `everyone` aligned in the organisation to improve, to rethink the organisation and the way it carries out its business, to hear the voice of the `people` that really do the job and the voice of the customers (internal/external). A caveat of this admission is that management’s and the workforces own conception of what needs to be improved and how much.

Management can set the priorities against strategic objectives, but it really needs to convince `itself ` that it is not missing anything, that its competitors are not stealing a march on it, that there is not a missing ingredient in the way that we do things compared to the way that our competitors do them that really gives them the `advantage`. This comparison of course is not just limited to our competitors, but to `world` best practise; on anything we can transfer from another area of activity into that of our own.

The fourth key to `Benchmarking` is that once we have accepted this need to study our competitors and `world` best practise, and, also, the importance of `internal` business processes, then we must bring these two themes together and systematically examine `all` our internal processes and performance in comparison to external `Benchmarks`.

The fifth and last key to `Benchmarking` is `Benchmarking` for survival and success. Most organisations leave it so late to measure their business; they do it only to survive. Do not wait until the last possible moment in the fight for survival to start the process for global `competitive advantage` for `best practise`.

`Benchmarking` is not a new concept, it has been with us since the fourth century (BC). The Chinese author Sun Tzu, known to be the patron saint of `Benchmarking`.

`Benchmarking` is a tool for people who are `serious` about making improvements. `Training` is necessary, both at the awareness level and for practical application. The `Benchmarking` process needs to be planned, steered, monitored and reviewed if maximum benefits are to accrue and the exercise is not to deteriorate into a `nice to know` outcome. Trying to do too much to quickly will result in information `overload` and confuse priorities; to allow people to become familiar with the methodology, two or three key areas for investigation are quite sufficient initially.

Senior management support and recognition will then act as a spur for further activity. To stay ahead in the global trading market place you will have to measure your organisation with the `right` people of any age, but with the ability to show `passion` and knowledge to be successful.

`Benchmarking` is about reaching to be the best with the `right` people who buy into the programme of improvement which will be continuous. Seek out the best of class in the world organisations who will share their success with you. The process of researching the best organisations is a major task which should be an internal operation so `you` choose the best organisations for the best results.

Information of interest: The Benchmarking Index that operates in the UK managed by a government department have the following statistics: since 1996 only 10,000 companies in total have participated in the scheme out of 3.7 million registered companies. Also, the information supplied is not checked, therefore there may be information of a mendacious nature. Similar schemes are operated by other countries government departments with the same results. I believe you should address your own Benchmarking scheme to reap the best results.

`Benchmarking` must begin within the organisation first with the total `buyin` from `all` personnel, then you are on the first step of the ladder to reach world case TQM. If you need help, take on board skilled and experienced people who can contribute to your success.

Other articles in the series;

* Measuring your Business Performance
* Crunch Time Questions to Survive in Business
* The Management of Change
* Scenario Planning
* Managing in a Down Economy
* Performance Measurement System for Business Growth
* 22 Point Plan for Success
* Benchmarking Overview

About the author

Colin Thompson, former successful Managing Director of Print Manufacturing Plants, Print Management/Workflow Solutions companies, former Group Chairman of the Academy for Chief Executives and Non-Executive Director, helping companies raise their `bottom-line` and `increasing cash flow`. Author of many business publications, research reports, business models on CD-ROM's/Software and over 400 articles worldwide. International Speaker and Visiting University Professor.

Checkout www.cavendish-mr.org for powerful publications and testimonials.

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E-marketing Insights - The Long Tail

Introduction

If tracking the pulse of the Internet is any indication, over the last 9 months, “The Long Tail” has become an important concept for marketers, and in particular, digital marketers to consider. Since the concept first came to prominence in an October 2004 article by Wired magazine's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, references to it have rocketed. Chris now has a lively blog and will publish a book next year. Seth Godin, has referenced it and you can see that it is still referred to a lot in blogs by viewing the frequency with which it appears on the Blogpulse trace (http://www.blogpulse.com/). It has also gained traction offline with prominent articles in the Guardian and Economist.

So, there seems to be a lot of fuss about the Long Tail, but what is it and what are its implications?

We start this article looking at how the concept was first introduced by Chris Anderson and in the second part I look at 7 examples of where we see the long tail in online marketing and examine the implications for marketers.

What is the Long Tail?

The first thing to know about the Long Tail is that it’s nothing new; it’s an old concept applied in new times. The second thing to know is that its greatest relevance to marketers is that it arises from the variability in human and consumer behaviour.

Zipf’s law

The phenomenon now referred to as the ‘Long Tail’ was arguably first applied to human behaviour by George Kingsley Zipf, professor of linguistics at Harvard who observed the phenomenon in word usage (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law). He found that if the variation in popularity of different words in a language is considered, there is a systematic pattern in the frequency of usage or popularity.

Discussion of The Long Tail shows how Zipf’s “law” can be applied to different collections of items which are selected by people. The “Law” shows how the frequency or popularity of the items varies.

Zipf’s “law” suggests that if a collection of items is ordered or ranked by popularity, the second item will be around half the popularity of the first one and the third item will be about a third of the popularity of the first one and so on. In general:

The kth item is 1/k the popularity of the first.

Notice that I say “law” in quotes, since it is not a physical law such as gravitational force, but an observation that there is a tendency to this frequency distribution.

Visuals are essential to understand this law – look at the Figure below which shows how the ‘Relative popularity’ of items are predicted to decline according to Zipf’s law from a maximum count of 1000 for the most popular item to 20 for the 50th item.

Figure – Zipf’s law showing decrease in popularity of items within an ordered sequence. Curves overlaid show variation in relative popularity for search referrals and count of page views from site www.marketing-online.co.uk

Power Laws and Probability Distributions

The pattern of rapid decline in popularity or frequency of occurrence you can see from the graph is sometimes known as a “Power law”. Such Power laws based on a probability distribution are observed in many fields, including physics, biology, geography, sociology and economics. For example, the size of earthquakes, the sizes of settlements and the level of income all follow a similar pattern.

Pareto’s law or the Pareto distribution, well known to marketers as the “80-20” law, that shows that 80% of our profits come from 20% of our customers is also a Power law. Pareto originally found that 20% of a population owned 80% of the wealth.

The Long Tail

This Long Tail effect is accentuated online. In Chris Anderson’s original article he refers to the popularity of books or other products stocked by a retailer such as Amazon. He says that Amazon uses it web and it supply chain management approach to create “an infinite shelf”. With the scale of Amazon’s reach into the worldwide online audience, it can still generate profit from the books on the tail since they won’t typically be discounted heavily. Through on-site search and personalisation facilities, a minor audience can be readily connected with the audience that it is interested in them.

But there is more. The Long Tail phenomenon can help drive sales of less popular items when combined with automated personalisation tools such as the “Amazon recommends” feature (readers who bought books on this topic, by one author, may also be interested in another author). Anderson gives the example of the climbing book Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. Although you may know this from the recent film, the book is much older, describing an incident in the 1980s, and was originally large known only to climbers. When another similar, but much more popular, mountaineering disaster story about Everest climbers (Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer) was published by 1990s the recommendation software noticed that some people who had bought the Krakauer book had also published the Simpson book. As a result it promoted the Simpson book thus increasing its sales dramatically, moving it nearer to the head of the Long Tail. Similar phenomena can occur on online DVD rental or music download also.

Anderson says that the implications are that online retailers should make available as wide a range of titles as possible (often on a long-back list) and then fulfil them when demand arises. He also promotes this as a triumph of online economics, saying:

“For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.”

Summary - Implications of the Long Tail for marketers

The Long Tail and Zipf’s Law can be applied to describe the variation in preferences for selecting or purchasing from a choice for products as varied as books, CDs, electronic items, travel or financial services. We will see later in this article, that evidence of this variation in preferences is also evident in researching these products online.

Since the tail is long, it is a mistake to concentrate marketing efforts only on the most popular items since many customers or prospects will have a different behaviour and so will have different content or product preferences. At the same time, with limited resources, there are arguments for concentrating marketing efforts on 20% of the product range that will deliver 80% of the volume.

In the context of online retail, Anderson recommends these three rules:

Rule 1: Make everything available. Put simply, the more products you make available, the more you will sell! Anderson says that many will say that the long-tail isn’t significant – the head is most important according to the 80:20 rule. Andersen argues that the tail is important from a competitive point of view since some competitors will not give their customers access to the full tail and the tail is often more profitable – discounting is not required to compete in the same way it is for the head.

Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it. This refers to the elasticity of pricing. He suggests that the long-tail may enable prices to be reduced to enable increases in volume at greater profitability. His example refers to what he suggests is overpricing for online music services. He gives the example of US provider Rhapsody performing an experiment in elastic pricing where tracks were offered at 99 cents, 79 cents, and 49 cents. Although the 49 cent tracks were only half the price of the 99 cent tracks, Rhapsody sold three times as many of them.

Rule 3: Help me find it. This can be related back to the Touching the Void example – popular titles have to be available to attract visitors to the site in order for them to become aware of the Long Tail through searches or personal recommendation. The tail should be easy to find through searching – users cannot be expected to find items on the tail by browsing through an extensive hierarchical navigation.

Digital marketing applications of The Long Tail

In Chris Anderson’s original article he largely limited his discussion of the Long Tail to retail products, but any online marketers familiar with web analytics – the study of customer behaviour online through web metrics – will be able to quickly identify other applications.

Chris’s article prompted me to think of these examples and implications of online behaviour that follow the Long Tail principle:

1. The popularity of web sites in a category measured through unique visitors.

If the number of visitors to all web sites, or sites in a category are plotted in order, they will show a similar pattern to that in Error! Reference source not found..This point has been noted by Jakob Nielsen in 1997 and 2003 (See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html for details). He explains:

‘Simply stated, big sites get disproportionally more traffic than smaller sites. A site ranked number 100, for example, will get 10 times more traffic than a site ranked number 1,000. (In general, site N gets M/N times the traffic of site M.)

Small sites have two huge advantages over big sites: there are many more of them and they are more specialised and thus more targeted. Small sites speak directly to the specific needs and interests of a committed user community, and thus have much higher value per page view.‘

A similar indication of popularity is evident in the number of links to different sites. See for example the number of votes for the top blogs (http://www.technorati.com/live/top100.html) and top shared bookmarks on social network Delicious (http://del.icio.us/popular).

Implication: E-communications techniques such as interactive advertising, affiliate marketing and link-building can be used to take advantage of the Long Tail. Using such techniques to communicate with potential visitors on niche sites can be a relatively low cost approach to achieving reach in comparison to expenditure on the top 10 portals of the web or a category. To deal with the number of sites on which to place online ads or affiliate links, ad and affiliate networks have been created to act as brokers between the site owners and the merchants.

2. The popularity of search terms within a category.

This includes both searches entered into a search engine such as Google and on an individual site (on site search).

The curve in the figure earlier in this article shows referrals to my http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/ fit the theoretical distribution very closely. Incredibly, the top 100 most popular keyphrases account for only 22% of all search terms that refer visits to the site, showing how long this tail is!

The frequency distribution of referrals from other sites shows a similar pattern (Google much more important, then Yahoo and MSN and then many smaller third party sites).

Another example of the variation in search behaviour, showing all searches across a single category is viewable from this summary by Danny Sullivan on Search’s Long Tail http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050314-164653). Danny refers to the “onesies and twosies” – those phrases which may only generate one or two visits per month, but may be collectively important.

Typically the complexity of phrase varies according to the stage of research about a product or content – initially searchers may enter a two or three word phrase (the popular phrases in the head), followed by a longer more precise phrase as they refine their search (the less popular phrases in the tail).

Data published by Hitwise (http://www.hitwise.co.uk/) in 2005 for a well-known travel site showed that well over 10,000 different brand and travel-related keyphrase terms are used to attract visitors to this site.

Implication: Keyphrase analysis used to determine which search terms to use for Search engine optimisation and Pay Per Click marketing is most effective when hundreds of potential phrases are analysed for each customer need (and on-site outcome) rather than a handful of keyphrases used in some cases.

Different search marketing strategies should be developed to exploit the characteristics of online user behaviour. Search engine marketers talk about strategies to target the head and the tail.

For example, one search engine marketing strategy could involve Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) approach to target the head with a Pay Per Click approach used to target the more specific and generally lower cost phrases in the tail.

Of course this is a simplification and there are exceptions to this approach; SEO strategy can also be used to exploit the tail. Speaking at the E-metrics Summit 2005 in London (http://www.emetrics.org/), members of Lastminute.com’s business intelligence team described how on-page copy for 12,000 product pages from their product database was optimised for search engines in order to connect searchers with less common destination-specific phrases. For example, a page labelled “Self-catering holidays in St.Lucia”, will be rare, but if someone does type it, a company such as Lastminute wants to be visble.

Conversely, Pay Per Click marketing could be selective used to target the Search term “head”. For example, typing “car insurance” shows many companies who are unable, in the short-term to be listed in the natural listings, using paid search to target the head.

This discussion raises the question of how many keyphrases a company should review to select which to optimise or advertise on. It is difficult to generalise, since it depends on the variation in behaviour of the audience and the range of products offered. One, well-known European shopping comparison site optimises on over a million keyphrases due to the variation in search behaviour and the range of products it offers! Fortunately, most companies have fewer products. Even so, for a retailer, financial services provider or travel company, the answer is probably ‘thousands’ and even for companies with a more limited range of products, the answer is ‘hundreds’

One way of tackling the ‘how many keyphrases’ question is to consider the “80:20rule”. This suggests that 80% of your search volume will be in the head, within the top 20% of phrases. The number of keyphrases you need to select to be visible or represented within the first one or two search results pages is then indicated by the top 20% of phrases are used within your market. This data can be gleaned through sources such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/), Overture (http://www.overture.com/) or Hitwise (http://www.hitwise.com/).

If there are just 100 phrases above a cut-off volume of say 10 searches per month in your market, this would indicate that optimising or advertising on 20 phrases would give you coverage of 80% of potential searches. However, as we have seen above, there are often thousands, or tens of thousands of phrases used in a given market. At a volume of 1,000 search phrases in a market above 10 searches a month, you need to be visible for 200 phrases to give you 80% coverage and at a volume of 10,000 phrases, you need to be achieve visibility for 2,000 phrases!

Take care with this simplistic approach though, since as we have said, the value is often in the tail – typically less competitive, lower cost phrases which are more likely to convert. The tail phrases only have this characteristic though in immature markets, it is interesting to speculate on what will happen when more marketers become adept at exploiting the tail. Competition will likely drive up paid search prices such that only those who are efficient at converting their customers and those who can derive the highest lifetime value from their customers will be able to afford to compete! Those companies which succeed will also likely have selected the best bidding strategies and the best bid management software (for example Atlas One Point and Bid Buddy) to manage keyphrases in the tail.

3. The popularity of content within a web site.

The curve shown in the figure for the count of page views of different pages on Dave Chaffey’s http://www.marketing-online.co.uk/ site is shown by the curve with triangles. Here there is a less good fit with the theoretical distribution and the tail is less extended with 90% of page views included within the top 50 pages. The tail is less long here since relatively few visitors use the site search on this site and the majority are constrained by the navigation and so are not likely to visit such a wide variety of pages.

Implication: the more pages you have with different content relevant to your audience, the more likely you are to meet the needs of your audience and the more they will engage with the content. This helps both for visitors arriving direct at a site and through arriving from search engines.

Having the right navigation, personalisation showing related content or products and on-site search to connect the audience with information about the tail is important also.

The more links there are to content elsewhere on the site will also “reduce the friction” on a page and is more likely connect a diverse audience with its diverse needs. Have you ever considered why the Amazon home page (http://www.amazon.com/) has so many tabs and links and is a relatively long page? Well, its all to do with the Long Tail – it helps connect Amazon’s audience with its product. The same is also true on Product-specific pages deep within a site – for example an insurer selling its products will do better when it has more links answering questions the customer may have. Compare for example, http://www.norwichunion.com/single-trip-travel-insurance which provides more detailed links to other contents than http://www.rac.co.uk/insurance/travel).

4. Conversion to outcomes on a site.

These outcomes can include sale, lead or simply finding the right piece of content.

It is well known that there are high attrition rates on e-retail sites, with only a relatively small proportion (usually less than 10%) completing the transaction.

Implication: It is less clear, in this instance, what the relationship to the Long Tail is. But I would suggest that there are a range of barriers that stop the conversion and they will vary in frequency due to the range in consumer preferences. For example, the most common problems are likely to be related to usability or trust about privacy or security, with some other reasons, for example, about copy being less important. Conversion specialist use web analytics, A/B or multivariate tests on new designs, surveys, focus groups and usability studies to determine what these problems are, and then to resolve them. We can suggest it is relatively easy to identify the most frequent problems, but it will be less easy to identify less frequent problems (e.g. problems with copy) and there will be diminishing returns and improvements in conversion through solving these problems.

5. Dwell times on a web site or web page.

A typical Long Tail distribution will be found if web analytics software is used to visualise the duration of visits to a site. This can either be measured through the number of minutes and seconds for each visitor session or the number of pages viewed by a visitor in a session. The majority of visitors will typically only stay for a few seconds or 1 or 2 page views.

The tail will be those who browse around a site and are interrupted to go off and view other sites or doing things around the home or office.

Implication: Measuring duration by the average time on the site is a poor way to understand behaviour on the site. The average length of time is skewed by people who leave a page loaded for over 30 minutes which is the standard cut-off time for sessions to end within web analytics software.

Better insights are available by considering the number of pages viewed in a visitor session and the type of content accessed. Web marketers can then infer barriers to converting to the main outcomes on the site such as registration, lead generation or purchase.

6. The Recency or Frequency of visits to a web site.

This time the variation in consumer behaviour concerns how often they visit a site or use an online service. There tends to be a range in behaviours according to site type and the Long Tail doesn’t always apply.

This may also show a Long Tail frequency distribution, but it will depend on the type of site as this article shows: http://www.jimnovo.com/graphs.htm.

For a portal site such as the BBC, MSN and Yahoo!, a typical Long Tail pattern will be found when plotting the distribution of recency or frequency amongst the sites audience (the first curve in Jim’s article). The majority of visitors will visit regularly – hourly or daily, but some will naturally visit less frequently and will have a lower recency also.

But this pattern will be reversed (an inverse Long Tail) for a destination site such as a retail site (the second curve in Jim’s article). Most visitors will visit or buy infrequently – perhaps once every few months rather than every day.

Different patterns will be seen in online services which require a log-in facility such as online banking – this may have a normal distribution, but this can be converted to a Long Tail as deviation from the average.

Implications: This type of recency and frequency visualisation is valuable in understanding how successful a company is in obtaining repeated online interactions with its customers. These don’t have to be sales interactions, they include:

· Sales transactions

· Service transactions (including log-ins)

· Content transactions (returning to view a particular content type such as news)

· Responses to e-mail (opens and clicks)

Again, average lengths of time quoted for recency and frequency need to be treated with caution because of the length of the tail. But as Jim Novo points out in his ‘Drilling Down’ E-book it is still useful to set ‘hurdle rates’ as targets for achieving certain levels of activity within a customer-base. For example, an online bank may seek to achieve 30% of customers servicing their account within a 60 day period.

7. Response to an e-mail campaign through time.

Typically around half of visitors will respond to e-mail by opening or clicking within 48 hours, but there will be a gradual decline over the next month or so as people have time to respond.

We often see in an E-newsletter with many links, that some linked content options will be much more popular than others, similar to that for a web page.

Implication: Related content and images need to be maintained on a server for as long as realistic. It should not be assumed in follow-up communications, that everyone has read the e-mail after 2 or 3 days.

More diverse content and offers may encourage higher clickthroughs. For example a single offer and clickthrough message is less likely to appeal to a diverse audience in comparison with 2 or 3 incentives to clickthrough. Of course, a balance has to be struck between offering choice and losing focus of the message and offer.

8. The popularity of items purchased from an e-retail site.

This is the main point in the original Wired piece summarised earlier in this article. There will be some items that are very popular and purchased frequently, but a Long Tail of items purchased less frequently, but significant overall.

Implication: A larger inventory will result in more sales. Higher profit margins are possible for less popular items since consumers may be prepared to pay more for difficult-to-obtain items. The Wired article explains how the popular items may draw visitors to an e-retail site, but how recommendation and personalisation tools can make them aware of items on the tail.
Weaknesses with Zipf’s law

In the digital world, the law is most accurate when the choice of consumers is not constrained by other factors – for example, keyphrases to search for are not constrained, but pages on a web site or links within an e-mail are constrained and influenced by the navigation and offers on the home page.

While we have suggested that the law is valuable since it highlights a range of customer behaviours and we should accommodate the full range of behaviours this is not always practical or desirable in practice. We often shouldn’t concentrate equally on all the different preferences for sites, content or products.

Given that resources are always limited, we still have to prioritise our marketing attention on the most popular items. For example, with search engine marketing it is logical to concentrate efforts on Google, Yahoo! and MSN as the three most popular search engines. Small improvements in search marketing efficiency on these engines can have the biggest returns. Likewise, the search terms which are most important within an industry, for example ‘cheap flights’ for the airline industry warrant special attention. Creating special pages or PPC ads to attract these visitors is worthwhile, but there’s a point of diminishing returns which is soon reached where the cost of additional promotional effort on less popular terms is not offset by the returns. The exception to this is where pages or ads can be automatically generated and optimised for search – a trick often used by affiliate marketers.

Next months article

Next time, we look at more practical matters – with all the reports about cookie deleting and blocking by consumers, can digital marketers trust them any more?

References and Further reading

Anderson, C. (2004) The Long Tail. Wired. 12.10. October 2004. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

Chris Anderson now has a blog site (http://www.thelongtail.com/), the Long Tail to support a book on the topic to be published in 2006.

Danny Sullivan – Search's Long Tail http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050314-164653

Wikipedia on the Long Tail and Power Distributions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail)

Seth Godin – Thinking about the Long Tail (part 1)

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/thinking_about_.html

About the author

Dr Dave Chaffey is workshop leader for a range of one-day e-marketing training workshops from the CIM:

* E-mail Marketing (www.cim.co.uk/0766)
* Running Effective E-marketing Campaigns (www.cim.co.uk/0767)
* Improving Your Results from Digital Marketing (www.cim.co.uk/1138)
* Marketing Research Using the Internet (www.cim.co.uk/1135)

Go to http://www.cimtraining.com/ for course details and online booking.

Dave Chaffey is trainer and consultant for Marketing Insights Limited (http://www.marketing-insights.co.uk/) and E-marketing Director at Ripe (http://www.ripe.co.uk/). He is a prolific e-business author whose books include ‘Total E-mail Marketing’, ‘Internet marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice’ and E-business and E-commerce Management.

Read Dave Chaffey’s blog (http://www.davechaffey.com/) for E-marketing Essentials – the 5 “must-read” articles about online marketing from the hundreds Dave reads each month.

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There's a Rich Vein of Gold Hidden in Your Company


Case studies offer a compelling and informative way of highlighting project successes and customer wins as well as the professionalism and expertise your company has demonstrated in getting the job done effectively. As end user endorsement is always more powerful than a company promoting itself, they represent one of the most persuasive sales tools available.

A case study typically describes a real situation involving a decision, challenge or an opportunity that an organisation has faced. It outlines how the challenge was addressed, how the chosen solution was implemented and the benefits that have subsequently been achieved.

Yet despite their obvious advantages, many organisations fail to take advantage of the opportunities case studies provide.

Most have great examples of customers who have purchased their products and who would be happy to endorse them. However, they rarely have the time or the in-house skills to write these references up into full-length case studies.

Often everyone is too busy focusing on the next sale to take the time to collect the persuasive client endorsement stories, which can help turn that next sales meeting into gold.

Nevertheless, in recent years, demand for high-quality case studies to support a company’s sales strategy has grown significantly. Customers are increasingly pressurising suppliers to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits that a particular solution can bring.

In recognition of this growing need, this article examines the benefits of case studies, outlines how to write a compelling success story and demonstrates why it may make sense to outsource this task to a consultancy with the expertise and resources to deliver first-class results.

Planning a Sales Case Study

Broadly speaking, technology case studies fall into two main categories. Those written to meet the brief of a particular magazine or other publication and those intended for use as collateral, to aid sales teams in their battle to close deals with potential customers. In this article, we focus on the latter.

Before you begin writing a sales case study, it is essential that you carry out the necessary preparation. There are two key steps: interviewing and research.

Interviewing should never be carried out cold. Before picking up the phone, it is important to do the necessary research into the story so that you go into the interview fully prepared.

However, it is also vital to ensure that your interviewee is as well prepared as possible. A good way to do this is to organise the interview and a list of key questions to send to the interviewee several days in advance.

Ideally, you should carry out interviews with at least two and possibly three individuals. Firstly, you will need to talk to the project manager who made the sale, primarily about the implementation process itself. Secondly, you should call the primary contact at the end customer to find out the key benefits the company has gained from the new solution.

Depending on the nature of the story, you may also need to talk to a contact at the supplier’s partner or reseller, particularly if they have actually installed the system themselves.

The Writing Process

As case studies focus on a problem the supplier company has solved, the writer needs to be very careful in how he presents that problem. Anything that suggests weakness in the client’s customer will not represent either organisation well.

Ideally a sales case study should start with a short executive summary, which contains a condensed version of what is to follow: covering the challenge, solution and benefits. This approach helps to provide clear signposting for the reader enabling him to appreciate the structure and content of the case study more clearly.

Within the main body of the story, the following areas need to be addressed:

The challenge: i.e. the “pain” the customer was experiencing, why they needed a solution. Within this section, it is often valuable to paint a picture of the marketplace within which your company operates and the industry factors which drive it.

Your focus should be on the specific business challenge faced and what the company was hoping to achieve by implementing a solution.

The solution: what was the answer? This section should examine the sales process, look in detail at the chosen solution and carefully explain exactly why it was chosen. Cover not just why the system was selected but why a solution from this particular supplier was chosen.

How were the challenges addressed? This section should show how the chosen solution specifically addressed the challenges being faced.

The benefits: what is the situation now? How is it better? This is arguably the most important section of the case study. It should describe the benefits you are now experiencing following the implementation of the chosen solution. It should then outline how the current solution compares with the previous system used.

Future plans: Has this solution led to any further developments? Wherever possible, the case study should include reference to your ongoing strategy and should seek to link this with your use of the system itself.

Tips on Style

There are certain rules of thumb to bear in mind when developing a sales case study, which are not always relevant when writing for a specific publication.

Structure: This should be more linear and chronological than in case studies targeted at specific publications and should NOT use a news hook (which risks aging the story).

Sentence length should be short and a straightforward narrative style avoided. Single-clause, punchy sentences should be used throughout;

Acronyms don’t necessarily have to be spelled out. A judgement on this issue should be made depending on the intended audience;

Reduced formality of style, e.g. using ‘it’s’ rather than ‘it is’ where appropriate;

General tone can include more client key messages and other subjective statements that would be out of place in editorial copy;

Consumer copy should focus on the human interest angle as much as possible;

Present tense should be used for all benefit statements, e.g. ‘The solution delivers improved productivity and continues to reduce operating costs.’

Taking the Outsourcing Option

Whatever story you have to tell, the crucial skill is in telling it accurately and effectively, with all the relevant facts and details that will paint a picture for your potential customers of just how capable a company you are. Your piece will then become an effective tool for increasing sales opportunities.

As we have seen, developing a case study is relatively straightforward, however, it can be a particularly time-consuming process. The good news is that there are a number of organisations such as Whiteoaks that, using experienced and expert teams of writers can supply a professional service tailored to your requirements. The end result will be a powerful set of sales tools and ultimately increased revenues for your company.

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Sales Leadership

Given the competitive nature of selling ? even though the protagonists do not compete face-to-face ? one might expect sales management to utilise coaching and other aspects of leadership to ensure their company achieves as many ‘wins’ as possible. For example, as suggested by Pitt, Ewing and Berthon (2002, pp. 643-44):

Sales managers can quite easily coach and mentor … salespeople by assisting them to develop a more focused strategy for soliciting new business. One possibility would be to encourage the salespeople to focus on a particular segment of the market … where margins might be higher. They could also help the salespeople to become better at screening prospective buyers … .

Despite potential benefits of appropriate leadership support, anecdotal evidence suggests that many sales managers believe that ‘experienced’ salespeople do not need support. In contrast to professional sports coaches, many sales managers do not monitor the activities of their salespeople and, therefore, are unable to provide meaningful feedback about selling activities that require improvement. Those managers “ignore the learning [available through] the use of behaviourally based measures like personal qualities, new account generation activities, and sales strategies and tactics employed” (Chonko, Dubinsky, Jones and Roberts, 2003, p. 938).

Research

Preliminary research to assess the level of leadership support provided by sales managers ? including support for specific steps within the selling process ? has been undertaken within three Australian companies involved in different business-to-business selling situations.

A draft questionnaire was developed following consideration of key factors identified in the literature; frameworks of the leadership process (such as that of Szilagyi and Wallace, 1987, p. 319); frameworks of the sales management process (such as those of  Baldauf, Cravens and Grant, 2002, p. 580; and Churchill, Ford, Walker, Johnston and Tanner, 2000, pp. 5 and 11); and a recently-developed framework of the selling process, illustrated in Figure 1. The questions related to the perceptions of salespeople about sales management support they received in their sales roles. This approach was taken since managers “are not very good at evaluating themselves” relative to objective criteria (Atwater, Ostroff, Yammarino and Fleenor, 1993, p. 577) and subordinates’ perceptions of a manager’s leadership style are likely to be more accurate than self-perception or perceptions of a senior manager or colleague (Zigarmi and Zigarmi, cited in Avery, 2001, p. 14).

The questionnaire was refined through structured interviews with three sales managers and several business-to-business salespeople, all of whom had completed a course in personal selling or sales management within an undergraduate or postgraduate degree in marketing. Each item in the final questionnaire incorporated a five-point Likert scale, with a higher value representing greater agreement that a particular management activity was undertaken by the respondent’s sales manager. The questionnaire comprised 79 questions in total, 31 of which are relevant to this discussion.

Figure 1: The business-to-business selling process

Source: Wilkinson, 2004, p. 4

Research findings

After obtaining management approval and support, questionnaires were mailed to 215 salespeople in three Australian companies, each a leader in its industry. Following up to two reminder letters, 137 usable responses were received, providing a response rate of 64% (varying from 50% to 83% within the three firms.) The methodology and response rates are consistent with those of prior salesforce studies  (such as Atuahene-Gima and Micheal, 1998, with a 14% response rate; Babakus, Cravens, Johnston and Moncrief, 1999, with a 58% response rate; and Rich, 1997, with a 75% response rate).

For eleven of the 31 questions, the mean score for all respondents is 3 or less (on a 1?5 scale, with 1 indicating a strongly negative response and 5 indicating a strongly positive response). These results provide some indication of a gap in the management support received by respondents in this study. As shown in Table 1, cluster analysis identified three groups of respondents with different profiles. Only one group, of just 39 respondents (or 28% of the sample), has an overall cluster centre mean of substantially more than 3 (on a 1?5 scale). Another group, of 29 respondents (21% of the sample), has a cluster centre mean of only slightly above 2. For this group, mean scores for twelve of the 31 questions are 2 or lower, and only three questions have means of 3 or more. Even Cluster #2, with a cluster centre mean score of marginally above 3, has nine questions for which the mean is below 3.

There are only two questions for which all three groups have positive responses (greater than 3) in an aggregate sense. The questions relate to (1) knowledge of job requirements and performance expectations, and (2) empowerment with respect to actions affecting customers and prospects. These results suggest that almost all sales managers make job requirements clear and let their salespeople manage their accounts without interference. On the other hand, two groups have somewhat negative responses (in an aggregate sense) to several questions regarding regularity of different forms of activity-based assessment. Those two groups also tend to have negative responses regarding different forms of support received for prospecting. This is somewhat surprising, given that prospecting is generally considered difficult (and stressful) for many salespeople, therefore warranting sales management encouragement and support. Both groups also have negative responses about whether management or specialists provide assistance to evaluate supply performance and to provide feedback to operations areas. This is somewhat surprising given the current emphasis on customer service.

In summary, based on responses from 137 salespeople from three companies in distinctly different industries and selling situations, it appears that a substantial minority of salespeople receive inadequate leadership support generally and that most salespeople have inadequate support in at least some areas.

Results of this initial study suggest a need for further investigation. Firstly, it seems appropriate to identify the level of sales management support among a much wider range of salespeople in various countries. Secondly, it would be useful to assess the effects of different levels of sales management support on the performance of salespeople. There also is merit in identifying reasons for the lack of support, such as whether sales managers believe some salespeople do not require support due to their high competency levels, or whether some sales managers lack the necessary management expertise to provide adequate leadership support. Inadequate management expertise is a distinct possibility given the lack of management training provided to many sales managers, as identified in research undertaken by Shepherd and Ridnour (1995) and Anderson, Mehta and Strong (1997).

Your participation in further research

Members of CIM are invited to participate in further research in this area ? directly and/or by forwarding the relevant website address (below) to appropriate colleagues, staff or other contacts. Two on-line surveys are being conducted:

·         Salespeople involved in business-to-business or business-to-reseller selling are invited to participate in an anonymous survey about the leadership support they receive, by logging into the questionnaire at http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/TellUS2/SurveyForm.asp?ID=2143.

·         Sales managers (in any field) are invited to participate in an anonymous survey about management training at http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/TellUS2/SurveyForm.asp?ID=2145.

These surveys are accessible until 30 June 2005. Respondents are able to request copies of summary survey findings (while still maintaining the anonymity of their responses). Additionally, if any sales or marketing managers would like to discuss participation in in-house surveys, or any aspects of the research, they are most welcome to contact the writer at John.Wilkinson@unisa.edu.au.

About the author

John Wilkinson is a PhD candidate at University of South Australia where he lectures in marketing management, specialising in personal selling and sales management. He has previously held industrial marketing management positions in both Australia and South Africa.
Table 1: Cluster analysis ? Final cluster centre scores

* Analysis of variance (ANOVA) confirms significance of differences in cluster centre (mean) scores at the 99% confidence level for all except the third question (on empowerment), and indicates that selection of three or four clusters is more appropriate than selection of two clusters. Selection of four clusters would provide two clusters with similar overall cluster centre means (3.0 and 3.2) and a combined membership (n=77) similar to that of Cluster #2 in this table.

References

Anderson, RE, Mehta, R and Strong, J (1997). ‘An empirical investigation of sales management training programs for sales managers’. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management. Vol XVII, No 3, pp. 53-66.

Atuahene-Gima, K and Micheal, K (1998). ‘A contingency analysis of the impact of salesperson’s effort on satisfaction and performance in selling new products’. European Journal of Marketing.
Vol 32, No 9/10, pp. 904-21.

Atwater, LE; Ostroff, C; Yammarino, FJ and Fleenor, JW (1993). ‘Self-other agreement: Does it really matter?’ Personnel Psychology. Vol 51, pp. 577-98.

Avery, GC (2001). ‘Situational leadership preferences in Australia: congruity, flexibility and effectiveness’. Leadership & Organization Development Journal. Vol 22, No 1, pp. 11-21.

Babakus, E; Cravens, DW; Johnston, M and Moncrief, WC (1999). ‘The role of emotional exhaustion in sales force attitude and behavior relationships’. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Vol27, No 1, pp. 58-70.

Baldauf, A; Cravens, DW and Grant, K (2002). ‘Consequences of sales management control in field sales organizations: a cross-national perspective’. International Business Review. Vol 11, pp. 577-609.

Chonko, LB; Dubinsky, AJ; Jones, E and Roberts, JA (2003). ‘Organizational and individual learning in the sales force: an agenda for sales research’. Journal of Business Research. Vol 56, pp. 935-46.

Churchill, GA, Jr; Ford, NM; Walker, OC, Jr; Johnston, MW and Tanner, JF, Jr (2000). Sales force management. Burr Ridge, Illinois, Irwin/McGraw-Hill.

Pitt, LF; Ewing, MT and Berthon, PR (2002). ‘Proactive behavior and industrial salesforce performance’. Industrial Marketing Management. Vol 31, pp. 639-44.

Rich, GA (1997). ‘The sales manager as a role model: Effects on trust, job satisfaction, and performance of salespeople’. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Vol 25, No 4, pp. 319-28.

Shepherd, CD and Ridnour, RE (1995). ‘The training of sales managers: An exploratory study of sales management training practices’. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management XV (1), 69-74.

Szilagyi, AD, Jr and Wallace, MJ, Jr (1987). Organizational behavior and performance. Glenview, Illinois, Scott, Foresman.

Wilkinson, JW (2004). ‘Toward an Enhanced Framework of the Business-to-Business Selling Process’. Australia & New Zealand Academy of Marketing Conference, Wellington, New Zealand.

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I’ll show you something that’ll make you change your mind

On the morning of 7th July, I drove my wife Michelle to work in London. At 8.45am we were at the entrance of Edgware Road underground station.

“Let me out and I’ll call you later,” she said.

“I can’t. This traffic is crazy,” I replied, tapping the steering wheel. We drove on. By 9.am I dropped her off near Bond Street tube.

The traffic slugged along like a snail carrying a discarded boot. The roads seemed busier than usual. At 9.40 my mobile phone bleeped with a message from a news text service. There had been an incident on the tube.

I switched on the radio and listened as Paul Gaunt on Radio London told me and my fellow Londoners about the incident. Rumours were that it was some kind of electricity surge. Passengers were being evacuated out of stations and onto public buses. Listeners rang in saying that they had never heard of a power surge so powerful to cause what had now been thought to have been some kind of explosion.

The traffic ground to a halt. Drivers wound down windows and chatted across white-lined roads about the news.

Now Gaunt was reporting that several bombs had exploded: one in a bus carrying commuters from the stations. I realised it was near a training centre where I taught most mornings in Euston.

I called my wife.

“I want you out.” They are saying that are bombs going off all over the place.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“Just tell your boss that you are going home.”

“I can’t. Besides, the trains have been suspended and now all the buses have stopped too.”

This was serious. I turned the car towards my wife’s office in the City. I could only drive as far as Paddington. I had no other option than to park and set off on foot.

Beyond the confines of my car’s tinted glass, the scene was stunning: London had stopped. No cars and surprisingly, no panic. The police had sealed off the main streets. People walking away from the centre were trying to call home on mobiles. Those without a phone, were lent sets by friendly passer bys. Some children gathered around policemen, I actually heard one say, “cheers for everything mate.” (Kids – ‘Hoddies’ - to policemen – in ‘big-bad’ London town!)

As a member of the Press, I was ushered through the police cordon to join a growing army of journalists heading towards St. Marys Hospital. Outside the hospital entrance a consultant spoke of grievous injuries. Spurred on by his statement I wondered how, what with all the barriers in place, I would reach the middle of London. I opted for the backstreets. Within forty minutes I had woven my way to Marble Arch.

Oxford Street was heaving with people. Yet again, no panic. Just complete strangers, in a capital notorious for being ‘cold’, asking if everyone was okay. Although no one was formally told what to do, we all knew our roles. One man helped a drunk join the rest of the throng walking away from where I was heading - the central district.

By now I was outside Bond Street. Whenever the mobile networks permitted, I spoke to my wife on the phone.

“Have there been any more incidents?” I asked.

“I am not sure. We don’t know whether we should leave the office.”

“Stay there. I am about an hour away by foot.”

Before long I was at Tottenham Court Road.

One of London’s more colourful characters is a gentleman who, day after day, marches up and down the West End in a crusade to warn pedestrians that “The end of the world is near.” Today was no exception. His placard made me chuckle. I picked up the pace.

Outside Holborn tube station, another group of people asked weary but patient London Underground staff for further news. No one argued. Most simply looked either north or south and set off on their journey homeward.

My wife was still about twenty-five minutes away, in the very heart of town. As I ventured deeper into the City’s arteries, the mood became not so much as sombre, but still.

Most American stores like ‘Nike’ and ‘Gap’ had closed their doors. Others remained open. It occurred to me that the whole scenario was bizarre. Despite the roads being deserted because of terrorists, here in the City of London shops like ‘Boots’ were selling sandwiches!

The sky grew weary and grey. The rain started to tumble. I was about five minutes away from Michelle. At last I spotted the street sign. I had arrived!

I had mentally prepared myself for a dramatic scene. What I got was people doing ordinary stuff that people do in offices. It seemed so improbably normal. Michelle was typing an email.

“You look exhausted.” She said, spotting the sweat on my brow.

“Well that comes from walking two hours!”

“I can’t leave yet. Just want to finish off some things…”

“You must be joking!”

“Go downstairs. There’s a wine bar open. Meet me in half an hour”.

This was ridiculous! There I was in the middle of London, having hiked through the thick of total uncertainty, being advised to go and have a pint at the local!

In the wine bar, I sat next to a lawyer (It was the City after all, and the Old Bailey was close by). He poured a glass.

“Outrageous!” He said, shaking his head at the table.

“I know.” I replied. “ I can’t believe this is happening!”

He looked at me curiously and said, “I am referring to the wine: it’s tepid!”

Now I really felt I was in some kind of weird existence!

Half an hour later, together with Michelle, I started retracing my many steps to Paddington. As we walked, we were both struck by everyone’s quiet, almost dignified resolve.

Back in the car I switched on the radio and listened to the accounts of the numbers of dead and wounded. I felt sickened that anyone would have acted so callously towards innocent people in the name of a ridiculous cause. (My thoughts fell to news I heard a few years later of the death of some of my wife’s cousins from a Palestinian terrorist attack in the centre of Tel Aviv).

As for today if it was to turn out that the cause was in the name of al-Quaeda, I felt that the foundation had become a brand in decline. Its message of ignorance had been propagated to highly susceptible people with twisted fantasies of fame, paradise and power pumped via global media.

As a marketer, I fully appreciated how television, the harbinger of global images, had become the equivalent of a tribal elder: One hand chastising families (viewers) with tales of warning. On the other tickling their fancies with title –tattle. Leaving the measure of everyone’s perception of reality being no wider than a 32” screen.

As for the brand followers of the lost cause, I remembered a security expert once explaining how many would have downloaded from the Internet, voyeuristic video clips showing death and devastation. A psychologist explained that many of these vulnerable wretches would have mentally place themselves at the heart of the ‘action’ as if in an X-Box game. Others, in exchange for common sense, would have been promised fifteen minutes of fame and an eternity of infamy. Their brand of inverse hope must have felt like a pretty ‘cool’ alternative than following a life mediocrity.

Yet today, on 7th July, any such promises had been proven futile. A bigger far more invincible brand had shown its true colours. Like any great brand, it didn’t rely on just facile slogans, shallow logos, absurd brand values or insincere figureheads. It drew its strength from the people who lived and breathed its ethos, simply because they chose to.

Today I saw that brand live in the face of a coordinated police force which, in less than an hour, secured the world’s biggest city. I saw it in students who unresistingly rushed to help and support victims. It was in the quiet voice of a London Transport worker who held the hands of a man she only knew as ‘Paul’ as he forlornly joked that now he had lost a leg could enter the 2012 Paralympics. It was in the eyes of countless ordinary people who, when the chips were down, acted responsibly and with care. I heard it in the voice of a man drinking a glass of wine who wouldn’t let some terrorist change his way of life. I understood it as never before.

Just days later, man’s greatest advocate for remaining on the fence in the face of any hint of strength of character – cynicism - would rear its ugly head. It was hardly surprising, especially when in the same week, when incidentally the BBC rewarded top management up to £500,000 each in bonuses, words on the otherwise excellent bbc.co.uk website like ‘terrorist’ were soon replaced with ‘militants’.

Yet the community’s resolve held. One week later, to the day, I was in Moor Hall, HQ for CIM. There I stood shoulder to shoulder with Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists, Hindus and Buddhist and even cynics, all who silently remembered the dead and survivors of 7-7.

Once again I felt as a Londoner. And I was proud to be part of my wider community.

About the author

Jonathan Gabay is on CIM’s core Faculty. He teaches several subjects, including, assertion, marketing and copywriting.

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Recruiting CRM people

It’s just over a year since we set up our search and selection business specialising in CRM, direct marketing, customer analysis and insight, market research and e-business. We have met many of the best people in the industry – including client-side directors of direct marketing, CRM and customer insight and specialists from marketing communications agencies and from many systems and information services suppliers. Often, we find that it is direct marketing people running or supporting CRM programmes.

Our candidate management process involves in-depth interviews. We also ask candidates to develop clear statements of their positioning and expected career, based on their experience, skills and requirements. Reviewing this material is fascinating. It makes us wonder whether candidates’ attempts to implement CRM strategies and solutions tend to succeed or fail. There is no simple answer here. Few give us evidence of great success in implementing CRM. Most described their companies’ caution and uncertainty about CRM. This often hampers progress, creating a vicious circle of lack of commitment and resource and weak implementation. If there were any successes, it seems that companies do not shout about it from the roof tops. We understand their caution in promoting their achievements, especially considering that many of them exp